I met Nayomi Munaweera in Bengaluru just after she had finished her panel discussion with fellow fiction writers Wanjiru Koinange and Han Yujoo at the the Times Lit Fest. Munaweera’s early years were fraught with giant cultural shifts. Born in Sri Lanka, her family moved to Nigeria in 1976. About a decade later they moved to Los Angeles. Munaweera was twelve years old.
I found parts of myself in her experience. I too am a fiction writer who grew up in an itinerant fashion. The fact that Munaweera has thrived within three very different cultures made me all the more curious about her understanding of the importance and role of fiction in our times.
Nayomi Munaweera is the author of two books. The first, Island Of A Thousand Mirrors, won the Commonwealth Book Prize for the Asian Region in 2013. It tells the story from the points of view of two women – one Sinhalese and the other Tamil – in Sri Lanka. The second book, What Lies Between Us, captures the shattering story of a Sri Lankan woman who moves to the US, carrying with her dark secrets and scars. She is now working on her third book, one that she won’t discuss just yet.
I like that she writes about the history of the land of her birth. I love that she is so confident and purposeful in working violence, memory, and war into her books. Her fiction demands to be heard in countries whose citizens that can barely recall when they last heard mention of the nation island of Sri Lanka.
We took a cab to Indiranagar so she could run a shopping errand and have some coffee. I promised her it was “close by” but the city’s traffic made me an unreliable host. It wasn’t till almost 45 minutes later that she was sipping her juice and I was gulping down my espresso. Munaweera is down to earth, willing to share her experiences and even consider how her insights might benefit me in my own writing career. She’s open and critically aware of the ironies and irrationalities of the world we live in. Later, over email, when she was back home in Oakland, California, I asked her some pointed questions as a continuation of our conversation. Excerpts from the two-stage interview:
Sri Lanka, Nigeria, USA. These places are all a part of your story as a person and a writer. I’ve always thought writers who are bi-cultural have both a significant advantage and a challenge when writing their stories. What do you think?
The disadvantage is that there’s always a period of questioning of the self whether this story belongs to you, whether you have the right to tell it. As someone who didn’t live through the civil war in Sri Lanka, I had to grapple with these questions as I wrote my first book. The advantage is that you are always an outsider so you have that freshness of perception. After all, one of the greatest American novels, Lolita, was written by a Russian.
The story of the publication of your first novel is compelling. Island Of A Thousand Mirrors was rejected by US publishers the first time around. But then it was published in Sri Lanka it and won the Commonwealth Book Prize in 2013. After this US publishers renewed their interest and you signed a two-book deal with St Martin’s Press. What are the pros and cons of awards according to you? How do you think they allow the world to view a writer?
Awards open up new worlds previously impossible for the writer to imagine as they write the book. They are very important to how much attention a book gets and therefore to what a writer can write next. However, awards are about many things, not just the quality of the writing so it’s not something a writer can think about as they do the deep work of the book.
You’re a woman of colour writing about war, identity, and violence. Both your books hold the civil war at its heart. Do you think fiction that addresses these under-discussed histories can start to be taken seriously by a large number of readers? Or do you think writers like you are read – and appreciated – by a limited but faithful audience?
I think reading in general, especially literary fiction, is loved by, as you say, a limited but faithful audience. I do wish people read as much as they did other things. Can you imagine a world where reading was as important as sports for example? Football in America or cricket in South Asia. We would be living in a completely different reality. I suspect it would be a better reality with greater compassion for other humans. But I don’t mind. We write because we are compelled to. I don’t think much about the audience until the book is completed.
Sri Lanka, relatively speaking, is mysterious and unknown to mainstream America. While globalisation has certainly changed things, what are the differences you see between the time you moved to the US in the ’80s and right now in 2018? Specifically with regard to your Sri Lankan writer identity.
People still assume I’m Indian. But at least they don’t assume I’m Mexican, which is what used to happen in high school in the ’80s. Now I’ll say I’m from Sri Lanka and I only get a blank stare about 20% of the time. I think social media has really made the world so much smaller. People are much more aware of each other. The blank stares are usually from older people.
The horrors of war are usually digested in news bites consumed in clinical bubbles that can’t begin to fathom those realities. For the average person, these systemic acts of violence can just become one big blur of “bad news”. How do you think the specificity of fiction and the act of writing “one story” help us comprehend the world?
Fiction is extremely powerful in making us empathise with those we have little in common with. When we read a good book, it feels like whatever the character is going through is happening to us. As social animals we literally cannot resist empathising – unless we are psychopathic. It’s how our brains have evolved. We don’t respond in the same way to news or reports. So fiction is the great empathy-creating machine.
Geeky writer question alert! Do you notice any differences in your style or prose between your first book and your second (What Lies Between Us)? What’s something you would do differently if you had to write your first book today?
No difference in style. I think that’s the one thing that stayed constant. I have been told that the second book is more confident, which I hope is the case. It was hard enough to write the first time.
An article I read said you didn’t use 80% of the significant research you did for your first book. I find this similar to my own writing experience. I spent months researching for my first novel and in the end only 10% of it crept into the pages. I think research is a critical part of writing a good book no matter how fictional. What are your thoughts on research being the spine of the fictional world you create?
You should do a ton of research and you shouldn’t use most of it. Exactly as you have experienced. I throw away about 90% of my research but all of it is in my brain as I’m writing the character, so I write the specific person through the lens of whatever I’ve researched for them. If you try to use most of your research – even the exciting stuff you learned – you’ll just bore your reader. Please don’t bore your reader. That’s the cardinal rule of writing. No one has to read your book. If it’s boring, no one is going to. Early manuscripts of my first book had tons and tons of politics in it. Then I realised I was just trying to be an expert instead of telling the story of specific characters. I took it all out and I think the book was so much better for it.
A quick Google search allows me to see who your literary influences are. Have you thought about what kind of influence – literary or otherwise – you want to be to the world?
Ha! What a sweet question, and one of the few I’ve never been asked before. I’ve learnt that there is a tremendous power in kindness and attention. People really respond to it. Deep listening and attention are the greatest gifts you can give anyone. I hope I’m a person who connects others. Writing can feel very lonely, You’ll wonder why someone else is winning all the awards, why your book has not been picked up when someone else’s terrible book has been. These thoughts hit all of us. But remember, “other writers aren’t your competition, they’re your salvation”. I really have found this to be true. Who the hell is going to understand my strange brain as well as another writer? Also that quote belongs to the brilliant Ursula K LeGuin, not me.
Truthspeak. Do you think women writers are going to significantly break male-centric publishing attention in our lifetime? Do you think it’s an issue worth commenting on as a writer?
I hope we do. It’s ridiculous that we are still where we are. Someone just did a study about women who win big prizes and it became clear that women writing about men have a much greater chance of winning these prizes. I think we have to remember that we are working against millennia of outright silencing of female voices in every single way. But it’s certainly time to change this. And yes I comment upon it every chance I get. Female writers – when do we just get to be writers? – are extremely aware of how differently we get treated from the male writers. I goddamn hope it changes during my lifetime.
